But to Rosamond these hours in the forgotten old manor-house on the moorlands, where the winds were the only visitors, brought so great a change that it was as if a gate had been shut upon her former road.
A common prate is that Time works the changes in us. And when we look from the child to the man, it would seem absurd even to raise the question. Yet it is not time that works the mightiest changes. Nay, in the world of the soul time but emphasises. The great upheavals that obliterate in our lives all familiar landmarks—that do alter everything down to our most intimate capacity of feeling, are sometimes but the work of one instant. It is not time that ravages, it is not time that draws the wrinkle seared into the heart; not to time do we owe the spread of the grey, instead of the gold that used to colour the web of existence. A man may carry the singing soul of his April to the death-bed of his old body. Yet again the heart may wither in a span so short as scarce to be measured.
And sometimes a change, so complete that even within our own soul we find ourselves suddenly on foreign ground, will come without any striking external event, without any apparent outside reason. In the life of the soul a crisis has occurred—and lo! the very world of God is different. Nay, God himself is another to us.
During these short wind-swept November days in the green and brown manor-house, there, amid the solitary downs, did such a change come to Rosamond. Had she tried, she could scarce have found her old self again. But she did not try; for this new self was at peace, was wrapped in dreams of great sweetness, and yet awake to a life hitherto not even guessed at.
* * * * *
In the attic room that had been Harry's own, she sat alone. A furious shower was pattering on the tiles close over her head, a drenched ivy spray was beating against the gable window like a frantic thing that wanted shelter, a pair of sparrows were answering each other with defiant chirrup. Far below in the house, Aspasia was lustily calling upon a recreant kitten. In the moorland silence these few trivial sounds became insistent, and yet seemed but to assert the silence itself.
She was seated at the wide battered old writing-table which schoolboy Harry English had scored with penknife and chisel, burned and inkstained. Before her a small writing-desk was spread open, and two or three letters lay loosely under her clasped hands. Her eyes were musingly fixed upon the rain-beaten pane with the knocking ivy branch; her lips were parted by a vaguely recurrent smile. And, as the smile came and went, a transient red glowed faintly upon her cheeks.... The world for her now was not upon the edge of winter: it was spring. She was not Rosamond Gerardine, out of touch with life, she was not Rosamond English, widow—she was Rosamond Tempest, maid once more, on the threshold of her life, at the April of the year. And Harry English was her lover. And yet she was a Rosamond Tempest such as he had never known—such a Rosamond Tempest as had never yet existed.
She took the letter that lay uppermost to her hand. It was dated Saltwoods. Written here—at this very desk, no doubt. Perhaps with this very ivory penholder, fluted, yellow, stained, while he sat in this same Windsor chair.... Unconsciously she caressed the worn wooden arms whereon his arms must have rested. Then again she set herself to read:—
"Saltwoods, 19th April."
On that April 19, all those years ago, he was thinking of her, writing to her! And she—so many miles away, shut in by the dreariest prison walls fate had ever built round a young impatient soul—had then not the faintest hint of her deliverer's approach.